We had some performance issue with a low profile config (4 vCores, 8 GB RAM), expecially with Oozie. Right now we reccomend at least 4 vCores and 24 GB or RAM). If you're planning a IaaS deployment on Azure using as metadata repository SQL Azure start directly with a S2/S3 instance: if you use Oozie it's the minimum requirement. Pay also attention to Ranger: it's OK to Ranger admin and users but for audits you need to look carefully at DB sizes: it can easly grow up faster. Use a script to truncate the table or use a different instance. ... View more

I think it's also a good starting point to use Availability sets for master nodes and worker nodes. Another good point is about using one storage account for every nodes in the cluster in order to bypass IOPS limits for multiple VMs on the same Storage Account. You can also try to use Azure Data Lake Store (with adl://) in order to check the performance on the new Azure service. You also need to remember the maintenance windows of every Azure region according to your customers: some regions could be a good choice for new service availability (e.g.: US East 2) but not from a maintenance point of view (expecially for european customers). We also verified great differences between IaaS performance and PaaS (HDInsight) performance due to low read/write performance of the Blob Storage: with the first one (configured correctly) you can achieve best performance. ... View more